#maladroids

Dear Searching Spark,

It does indeed. The Builders of Cybertron would carefully graft together the sparks of promising Maximals and Predacons together to create new ones, as a way of trying to bypass relying on the Terran Energon Matrix. The Maximal Windrazor, for instance, had his spark created through grafting fragments of the spark belonging to Dive Bomb, a veteran of the games, together with that of Phantomjaw, a member of the Predacon Secret Police. However, the practice never really caught on, as it required an enormous amount of energon.

After the Grand Uprising, it found new uses—first to create new Maximal and Predacon protoforms, and then in the development of Commandron and Maladroid mind-engrams. In the former case, two members of the Maximal High Council, long having been in love, decided to use spark splicing to help bring it into a newly manifest form. Two members of the Maximal High Council, long having been in love, decided to use spark splicing to help bring it into a newly manifest form. The resultant protoform, Tigerhawk, was the first protoform created on post-Uprising Cybertron, and was seen as a symbol of the newfound unity.

Dear Evolution Enthusiast,

In some highly divergent realities, the Commandrons who inhabited that far-future era adopted organic alternate modes based on these strange post-human creatures to fight back against their enemies, the Maladroids. While the Maladroids sought to destabilize these societies from within and plunder the technologically advanced ruins of the precursor races who had twisted humans into these forms, a number of Commandrons became deep cover agents, adopting new alternate modes that would allow them to move about undetected on the myriad colonies.

On a world of tropical islands and archipelagos, Ether Walker used her sail person form to match wits with Iron Fang, who chose the form of a native pterosaur-like creature. On another planet, Galaxy Questrian used a mantelope form to defeat Hypergear. On an arid planet, Deep Blue and Thunderclap posed as a highly-evolved lizard and its mindless humanoid mount to battle Helterskelter. Sonic Ronin the killer person used powerful fangs and claws to subdue both posthuman prey and the Maladroid warrior Coldstar.

Dear Titan Tracker,

The Fortress Maximus of that reality was created as a weapon of war and war alone. His frozen, towering presence in the city of Tarn might have been a random accident, but the Builder regime turned that accident into a statement of intent—an oppressive form of psychological warfare conducted against the Maximals and Predacons who toiled in his mighty shadow. But, of course, regimes rise and fall, and in the lawless aftermath of the Vehicon Apocalypse the frozen corpse became a popular target for scavengers, who stripped whatever valuable they could scrounge or steal from the gigantic ‘bot to sell on the black market. The Cybertronian Parliament had more important problems to deal with, and in a matter of years the Megamaster had become a hollowed-out shell, little more than corroded armor plates draped over a decaying skeleton of struts and servos.

Dear Technoorganic Thinker,

Unlike the Great Transformation caused by Optimus Primal in other realities you might be familiar with, the evolution of the Cybertronian proto-races was a more gradual process. The physiology of the Commandrons and Maladroids was derived from technology pioneered by the homo sapiens circuitus Ne'll and the Maximal Rapticon in the late 25th century, involving the bonding of Cybertronian spark-data onto Eutychus Project mind-scans; the resulting mind-endgrams are unable to be hosted in a conventional protoform, which led to the development of "proto-cells" made from a combination of living metal and synthoplasmic polymers that could emulate human biology in a technological form.

Following the end of the Fifth Cybertronian War, the Black Convoy—themself the child of the Earth-born Kelly Shiragami and Splendid Major of the League of Autonomous Proto-States—oversaw the implementation of a new evolution of Cybertronian reproduction. Multiple sites were set up to create these new, technoorganic beings; known as "Matrix" facilities after the Energon Matrix that had spawned the proto-races and the long-lost Creation Matrix before it, these facilities would both grow clusters of self-replicating proto-cells and infuse the new beings' positronic brains with the mind-engrams that would give them life, creating them either from a great archive of human and Cybertronian data, or from the bonding of two other hybrid Transformers. While the majority were overseen by the Convoy Council (the Commandrons' judicial body) or the legislatures of independent city-states, the largest of these facilities, located beneath the resting place of the Grand Mal, was managed by the Grand Triumvirate of the Maladroids; with a sense of irony that would come to characterise Maladroid culture, it was quickly nicknamed the "Pit".

While some considered the sparkless, technoorganic Transformers to be "impure" or "unnatural", in the centuries following their introduction Cybertron's science and culture accelerated at a pace faster than in any recorded history, even outstripping the heights reached by the Human Confederacy before the Fall of Man. Though a series of conflicts across the 34th and 35th centuries—costly for Cybertron and devastating for humanity—led to conservative restrictions from Council and Triumvirate alike, the subsequent Energoa Conflict would eventually... well, perhaps that is a story for another time.

And now I am left to ponder where the evolution of the Cybertronian race may take it in the future... for, as I am sure you have heard many times over, it never ends!

Dear Convoy Connoisseur,

Another Converters cover!